Introduction

The term ‘hominoid locality’ is common enough in the informal jargon of students of fossil mammals, and is frequently used in a sense that somehow implies more than just ‘a locality from which hominoid material has been recovered’. It is a natural and intuitively attractive expectation that hominoid primates would occur in characteristic habitats and taxonomic settings. One might, for example, expect to find hominoids at localities that have produced large numbers (individuals or species) of other frugivorous, omnivorous or arboreal mammals. The impulse for the present study arose out of a wish to investigate whether, in fact, the pattern of hominoid occurrence differs from that of non-hominoid mammals in some easily demonstrable way. The trivial answer to this trivial question appears to be ‘no’, but as it turns out this ‘no’ hides a remarkably strong pattern that can be related both to the occurrence and the disappearance of hominoid primates from western Eurasia.

The opportunity to carry out such a study, without an inordinate data compilation effort, has recently arisen through the creation of the NOW database of Neogene Old World fossil mammals (Fortelius et al., 1996b; see also under ‘Material’). One of the main objectives of the European Science Foundation Network on Hominoid Evolution and Environmental Change in the Neogene of Europe (HOMINET) was the revision and updating of the NOW database, especially with regard to ‘hominoid localities’. To some extent, this chapter may be regarded as a pilot study and summary presentation of the state of the database at the close of the HOMINET in the autumn of 1998.